times more malicious and full of craft than Blunderbore himself. In short,

'The child is father of the man,'

and, at eight years old, over 'Jack the Giant-killer' feels the same sort of satisfaction as his father who reads 'Ivanhoe,' and rejoices when the great hulking tyrant Front de Bœuf is roasted in the flames of his own castle. Justice has been outraged, but is vindicated; and the rough dentistry practised on Isaac of York is fairly revenged. Neither boy nor man is the worse for believing the profound truth that good after all is stronger than evil, in spite of all the world may say, though one learn it from a romance, and the other from the exploits of a hero who never lived.

But, if wrong and injustice triumph in a story to the very end, children are wretched; not at the mere deaths, miseries, or murders, but at punishment falling on the wrong head. Their moral sense is injured. The conscience of a child, taught fairly to love what is pure, brave, and true, is tenderly alive to a sense of every injustice as a departure from his own high standard. By and bye, when he is older and wise enough to believe in spirit-rapping and to disbelieve in Moses, as the world begins to get hold of him, he will see more than enough of wrong triumphing over right, and falsehood over truth. Meanwhile, a tender conscience is his choicest inheritance; and as the world of fiction, as well as of Nature, opens to him her golden realms of delight by fairy wells and shining gardens, talking fishes and enchanted castles, his imagination and fancy carry him away in a moment from all the little miseries of schoolboy-life, and give to him a domain of his own in which he can wander, and which he can rule, at his own sweet will.* There is, too, a divine principle of leisure. Life is not altogether a pursuit; there are golden hours in it, when we may feed the mind in a wise passiveness:

'The grass hath time to grow in meadow lands,

And leisurely the opal, murmuring sea

Breaks on its yellow sands.' †

It is a poet, as well as a brave knight, who says, 'The dealer

Among a host of other remarkable men who thus rejoiced in a little world of their own was Hartley Coleridge. Hartley Coleridge,' says De Quincey, had a kingdom which he governed for many years; well or ill, I can't say. My own kingdom was an island, called Gombroon.' Derwent,' used Hartley to say to his brother, 'I have had letters and papers from Ejuxria; then came his torrent of words in a resistless stream,' &c.-Memoir of H. Coleridge, p. xxxix.

† 'Fraser.'

in fiction cometh unto you with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner; and pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue, even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things by hiding them in such as have a pleasant taste; which, if one tell them the nature of the aloes and the rhubarbarum they should receive, they would sooner take their physic at their ears than at their mouth.'* Our general position, then, is that there is a fair, wise moral lying hidden in sound, healthy fiction, which all may read who will. It may not always lie on the surface; yet always near enough to be apparent in a good, natural story, allegory, or fable. Facts should disclose their own virtues. He who is able to benefit by a lesson will, no doubt, discover it under any husk, before it is stripped and laid bare to the kernel. Too much teaching hardens the heart.' † The youngest reader who has any brains and takes an interest in what he reads-as every child does who is kindly taught-gets hold of the moral for himself without having it preached into him, and without even a reflection tagged on as an antidote to the fiction. He takes in all together, the seed and the soil in which it grows; by and bye, in due season, the dainty seed will spring apace into leaf, blossom, and golden fruit.

To take an example, what can be better than such a fable as 'The Wind and the Sun,' told simply as Mr. James ‡ tells it, to teach a child that Persuasion is stronger than Force

'A dispute once rose between the wind and the sun which was the stronger of the two, and it was agreed that whichever soonest made a traveller take off his cloak, should be accounted the more powerful. The Wind began, and blew with all his might and main a blast, cold and fierce as a Thracian storm. But the stronger he blew, the closer the traveller wrapped his cloak about him, and the tighter he held it. Then broke out the Sun, with welcome beams driving away the vapour and the cold. The traveller felt the pleasant warmth, and as the Sun shone brighter and brighter, he sat down, overcome with the heat, and cast his cloak on the ground. Thus the sun gained the day. Sunshine is stronger than blustering force.'

So, also, with the well-known fable 'The Miller, his Son, and the Ass;' we see in a moment the folly of trying to please everybody, and having no will of our own. First the man, then the boy, then neither, then both riding; then the ass strung to a pole on the shoulders of those who should have ridden him, toppling headlong into the river. 'Endeavouring to please everybody he

pleased no one, and lost his ass into the bargain.' So again, with Jupiter and the Waggoner,' who, driving his horses idly along a country lane, gets his wheels deep down into the mire, and there sticks fast. The boy reads it, and at once sees the curse of sloth, the blessing of work; if you want help from a higher power put your own shoulder to the wheel; and don't lie there in the mud howling to Jupiter.* God helps those who strive to help themselves; or as the Spanish proverb has it,

'Pray to God devoutly,
Hammer away stoutly.'

Or, suppose we wish to teach that every one had better be content in his own place,-cuique suum; what can tell it to a child more lightly and pleasantly than the following?

'The Mountain and the Squirrel
Had a quarrel;

And the Mountain called the Squirrel a little Prig.
"Bun" replied,

You are doubtless very big;

But all sorts of things and weather

Must be taken together

To make up a year,
And a sphere.

And I think it no disgrace
To occupy my place.
If I'm not so large as you,
You are not so small as I,
And not half so spry.

I'll not deny you really make

A very pretty squirrel track;
Talents differ; all is wisely put;
If I cannot carry forests on my back,
Neither can you crack a nut.

Let both be content

With what is sent.'

Even such an outrageous story as 'Bluebeard' has its meaning and its use. A young lady is goose enough to marry an old man with a blue beard, who had already had half a dozen wives, and got rid of them in a very queer way. But she determines She duly promises

to marry him and become Mrs. Bluebeard. to honour and obey him; but soon breaks her word, peeps into

*I will never despair,' says Feltham, 'because I have a God; I will never presume, because I am but a man,'

the

the forbidden chamber of horrors, and then tells a lie to hide her guilt. The end of it is that desperate scene on the tower with Sister Anne, from which she barely escapes with her life. Bluebeard is an old monster, no doubt, for chopping off the heads of his six wives, and well deserved being cut to pieces by Mrs. Bluebeard's infuriated brothers; but how could one better show the danger and folly of that meddling, itching curiosity which besets us all-or the peril of lying? Why not have let the fatal Blue Room alone?

If young people need be taught that it is best for every one to attend to his own business, especially if married, let them turn to one of Mr. Dasent's charming Norse Stories, The Husband who was to mind the House,'* through which a sparkle of humour runs like a vein of silver, and which we will here condense into the smallest possible space. He was a surly, cross fellow, who thought his wife never did anything right in the house. So, one day they agreed to change places. His Goody took a scythe and went out with the mowers, while he was to mind the house and do the home-work. First of all he wanted to churn the butter, but when he had churned a little he got thirsty, and went down to the cellar to tap a barrel of ale; just as he knocked in the bung, and was putting in the tap, he heard overhead the pig come into the kitchen. So off he rushed, tap in hand, to look after the pig who, when he got upstairs, had upset the churn, and was grunting among the cream which was running all over the floor. He ran at piggy in a great fury, and gave her such a kick that she lay for dead. Then all at once remembering the tap in his hand, he ran down to the cellar and found every drop of beer had run out of the cask; so back he went to his churning. All at once he remembered that the cow, shut up in the byre, hadn't had a morsel of food, and as the house lay close up against a steep down, and a fine crop of grass was growing on the thatch of sods, he thought he would take her up to the house-top. But he could not leave the churn with baby who was crawling about on the floor, for she was sure to upset it, so he put the churn on his back and went out. But thinking that the cow wanted water before her dinner, he took a bucket to draw water; and as he stooped, all the cream ran over his shoulders down into the well. And now it was dinner time, so he filled the porridge-pot with water, and hung it over the fire. Then, thinking that the cow might perhaps fall off the thatch and break her legs, he tied one end of the rope round her neck, and slipping the other down the chimney, made it fast to his

Vol. 122.-No. 243.

*P. 310.
F

own

own thigh, and began to grind away at the oat-meal. All at once down fell the cow off the house-top, and as she fell she dragged the man up the chimney by the rope. There he stuck, while poor Colly hung swinging half way down the wall.

'And now the Goody had waited seven lengths for her husband to call them to dinner: but never a call they had. At last, home she went; and when she saw the cow hanging in such an ugly place, she ran up and cut the rope in two with her scythe. Down went her husband in the chimney with a great crash, and when his old dame came inside the kitchen, there she found him standing on his head in the porridge-pot.'-Norse Stories, p. 310.

6

Here, story, moral, and style are all excellent, and the boy who reads is not only amused, but in Mr. Dasent's spirited translation has the infinite advantage of reading pure English in all its strength and beauty. But, it is quite possible to make fables as ungrammatical and vulgar or coarse, as they are crabbed and dull; and thus set an intolerably bad example where choice language is specially needed. Thus, Mr. Townsend in The Birds, Beasts, and the Bat,' indulges in such elegancies as 'The bat taking advantage of his ambiguous make declared himself neutral' (p. 62). The cock scratches with a spurred claw,' &c. (p. 61). With singular good taste, in a book for children, he makes the ox cry out to the dog, A curse light on thee for a malicious beast; with a fine ear for grammatical elegance, he makes the cat ask the cock (whom she had pounced upon), 'what he could say for himself why slaughter should not pass on him;' (kindly adding half a page of moral to this novel and excellent tune, The cat in this fable is by no means an amiable character, &c.'); while in the well-known fable of the 'Old Man and his Sons,' he has this equally choice passage-The father ordered the bundle of sticks to be untied, and gave a single stick to each, at the same time bidding him try to break it; which, when each did with all imaginable ease, the father addressed himself, &c. For if you would but keep "yourselves" united, &c., it would not be in the power of mortal to hurt you; but when once ties are broken, &c., you will fall a prey to enemies, and deprive "yourself," &c. It is hard to say whether the former or latter clause of this paragraph is the more admirable of the two, the unique which' with its attendant comma, or the happy blending of selves' and 'self,' as applied to the same person; but the sentence would have been a treasure to the late Mr. Lindley Murray. Nor is this Mr. Townsend's only excellence. At times, where the fable is unusually simple, he rises in explaining it to a height of pompous gravity which rivals Mr. Bumble himself; as in the case of

'The